Blue Eyes
by Madelyn
Summary: Little sappy C&M standalone... enjoy!


**A.N.** **Hey everyone! I'm back, but probably not with what you want ****L**** Long December is currently (obviously) on hold as I deal with school, tennis, and life in general. But I heard this song- Blue Eyes, by the Cary Brothers (on the Garden State soundtrack, which I highly recommend!) and it was like a story begging to be written. So sit back and enjoy some cute, C&M mush (which has been SERIOUSLY lacking lately!)**

**Love,**

**Maddy******

_Disclaimer: I don't own the characters or the song._

It was the same dream. Chandler woke with a start and reached out to nothing, which was almost scarier than the dream itself. He recalled her brother on the living room couch, their mutual agreement to cool it for a few nights, play it safe. Sneaking past Joey's room had been one thing; climbing over cardboard boxes and slipping past Ross on the sofa was a little riskier. He took several deep breaths, kicked the quilts off, and wiped the sweat from his brow. Screw it, this was too hard.

He was as quiet as possible while fishing the girls' key out of the key drawer, knowing she wasn't expecting him and hadn't left the door unlocked. Ross stirred once, but didn't see him, and he snuck out unnoticed. Once in the hall, he sighed. One down, one to go. Rachel slept through earthquakes, though- he smirked at memories of testing that theory.

Chandler unlocked the door to the darkened apartment and made his way to Monica's room. She was sleeping on her side, like she always did, and she didn't hear him come in. He pulled the covers away from the other side of the bed, crawled in, and wrapped himself around her, finishing at long last the search his arms had begun ten minutes ago. She shifted in his embrace and woke slowly, turning over so their faces were together.

"Hey…" she whispered.

"Hey," he replied, kissing her softly.

She opened her eyes and ran her fingers through the still-damp hair at the top of his forehead.

"That same dream?"

"How'd you know?"

"You're a little sweaty, and I can still feel your heart beating," she said, placing her hand over his chest. "You still don't remember any of it?"

He shook his head. "I just wake up petrified, but the dream's instantly gone. It's so weird," he said.

She kissed his cheekbone, then his eyelids, up to his forehead. "I'm sorry, baby."

"I reach out when it's over, you know," he admitted after a few seconds. He didn't know why he told her that, it wasn't something he would usually do; it just came out.

She tried unsuccessfully to stop the little smile that tugged at her lips. "Really?"

"Yeah," he said, and closed his eyes, signaling that the conversation was over. She kissed his lips once anyway, and felt him smile against her mouth before settling back in his arms, for once not worrying about setting the alarm to give him time to sneak out in the morning.

_Wish enough, wise man'll tell you a lie  
Window broke, torn up screens  
Who'd have thought that you'd dream  
Of a single tragic scene  
  
I just wanna sing a song with you  
I just want to take it off of you…_  
  
_Cause Blue Eyes,  
You are all that I need.  
Cause Blue Eyes,  
You're the sweet to my mean._

Rachel grabbed the toast as it popped from the toaster and handed the first two slices to Joey.

"Toast?" Joey whined. "That's not _breakfast. I_ could've made _toast_."

"Then why _don't_ you?" Rachel retorted, reaching back and grabbing the slices off his plate just as fast as she had put them there.

"Hey!"

Rachel made a face and took a huge bite. "Make your own breakfast."

Joey pouted. "This is the worst day ever."

"Joe, it's eight o' clock," Ross chimed in from his seat at the table.

"I know! I had to get up at the crack of dawn to get ready for this audition, _and_ Monica's flaking out on breakfast!"

"Where is she, anyway?" Ross asked.

Rachel shrugged. "Not up yet."

"That's weird," Ross mused, before getting absorbed in a newspaper headline and forgetting all about it.

There was a momentary silence, and then Joey banged his fist on the counter. "I'm starving!"

Monica woke up to the sounds of people in the kitchen. It was unusual for them to be over before she was up, she thought. Then, as her senses slowly returned to her and she felt that the pillow beneath her head was not, in fact, a pillow but Chandler's chest, she sat up abruptly and yelped when she saw the time.

"Hey. Hey. Chandler," she said, shaking his arm.

He groaned in response and tried to pull her body back into his.

"No, no, babe, you have to get up. It's eight. It's eight!"

Chandler's eyes opened quickly. "It's what?"

"It's _eight_," she said frantically, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. "What do we do?"

"Are they here?" Chandler asked, at the exact moment they heard a thud and Joey complaining about being starving. "Never mind."

"Oh God," Monica said, rubbing her forehead with her hand.

"Hey," he said, reaching out for her shoulder. "Hey. Relax."

She looked at him incredulously. "Relax? Oh, I'm totally relaxed. No one's gonna kick the crap out of _me_ for sleeping with _you_. However, you are going to have one extremely disturbed brother on your hands. Not to mention, an extremely disturbed brother who is currently on _psychiatric leave _from his job."

Chandler laughed. "You're forgetting two things. One, aforementioned brother is _Ross_. The last time he beat someone up, it was you, and you were four. And secondly… No one knows I'm in here. Nobody seems to be in a hurry to barge in on you sleeping. So I say…" he said, lacing his hand through hers, "you lie back down here, and we take advantage of this situation."

She looked at their hands entwined together, then back at his impishly suggestive face and couldn't help but smile. If it was anyone else, anyone else in the entire world, Monica would have laughed good-naturedly, gotten out of bed, and devised a logical plan to get him out of there before anyone could find out. The plan would most likely include bullet points and a sketched map. But with Chandler, it was different. Whenever he said stay, she had a really hard time remembering why she was ever going to get up in the first place. She just looked at him, for a while, processing this feeling, the one that was creeping over her more and more lately, a feeling of recklessness and danger and intense, all-consuming desire to be near him.

"Hey, Blue Eyes, what are you staring at?" he asked with a little smile.

She shook her head and leaned over him, pressing their foreheads together. "Nothing," she said, covering his mouth with hers, trying to convey every ounce of what she felt for him in a single kiss. Trying to convey her love for him without using the word neither of them were allowed to utter.

She pulled away several moments later and ran her hands through his hair as she caught her breath.

"So we're staying, then?" he asked, his own breathing hard and hot against her cheek. She nodded briefly before he captured her lips in another passionate kiss.

_Fess it up, dot on the palm of your hand  
I can help you to stand  
Saved it up for this dance  
Tell me all the things you can  
  
I just wanna sing a song with you  
I just wanna be the one that's true  
  
Cause Blue Eyes  
You're the secret I keep  
Cause Blue Eyes…_

An hour later, Monica poked her head out her bedroom door after hearing the front door shut for the third and final time as Rachel left for work. She turned back to her secret accomplice and smiled.

"Coast is clear," she said.

He finished making the bed- a sweet gesture, though they both knew it would be remade in a matter of minutes- and gave her a quick kiss.

"You want breakfast?" she asked, leaning back against the doorframe.

"You don't have time," he reminded her.

She shrugged. "We're already late."

He gave her a look of disbelief and laughed. "What have I done to you?"

She looked back at him seriously. "I don't know."

He caressed the side of her face, trying to soak in as much of this moment as he could, memorize the way she looked standing there in her Knicks t-shirt that stopped just past her thighs, with her dark hair tucked messily behind her ears and her blue eyes shining in a way he couldn't remember them shining a few months earlier, and he liked to think it had something to do with him.

He kissed her slowly. "Why are you doing this?" he asked quietly, barely audible, into her hair when they parted.

She stayed wrapped around him, barely moving. "Doing what?"

"This. Being with me."

She pulled back and looked at him incredulously. "Why? You know why..." she said, playing with the hair at the nape of his neck. "Even if I'm not supposed to say it out loud," she added quietly.

He chose to disregard that last part, and held her tightly. "I guess a part of me is still just your wise-cracking best friend, sitting at home waiting for you to come back from your date and secretly praying it went really badly. And it's hard for that guy to comprehend the idea of getting to be the one who is with you."

He felt her shake her head, nestled in the crook of his neck.

"You don't know the greatness you are," she whispered, sending a chill up his spine.  
  
_All the lights on and you are alive  
But you can't point the way to your heart  
So sublime, when the stars are aligned  
But you don't know  
You don't know the greatness you are  
  
Cause Blue Eyes  
You are destiny's scene  
Cause Blue Eyes  
I just wanna be the one  
  
_

Chandler tossed, turned, and checked the clock again, certain it would be at least a half hour from the last time he looked. 12:58, it said, and he blinked, dismayed to find it had been less than five minutes. He hadn't seen her since their unusually late morning together; she worked the late shift that night, which meant she got home roughly… an hour ago.

_It's__ fine, _he told himself, _you'll see her in the morning for breakfast. You used to go whole days without seeing her, when your schedules conflicted. That was before. _

_Was it worth braving the roommates,_ _the boxes, the brother, finding the key, waking her up, just to say goodnight and then having to wake up at five thirty to sneak out before anyone could catch them?_

_Yes._

Again, he padded quietly past Ross, sleeping on the yellow couch. He extracted the key, easier to find this time because it was right on time. He let himself out of apartment 19 noislessly, into apartment 20 even more cautiously, and tip-toed across the apartment and into her room.

He crawled into bed beside her, and felt her stir slightly against his body. God, even just the brush of her skin against his made him crazy. He massaged her shoulder, hoping she would just fall back to sleep; she was so tired on the weeks when she had these late nights.

But she was already opening her eyes, smiling through the misty fog of sleep. He kissed her nose. "Hi," he said simply.

"Nightmare again?" she asked sleepily.

"Nope."

She smiled in spite of herself. "You love me."

He nodded slowly once the shock wore off. "Yup."

She rolled on top of him. "Say it," she whispered.

He kissed her deeply. "I love you, Monica," he breathed when he pulled away.

"I love you too," she said softly, brushing away tears he didn't realize were on his cheek with her pinky finger.

_I just wanna sing a song with you  
I just wanna get it on with you  
  
Cause Blue Eyes  
You're the secret I keep  
Cause Blue Eyes  
I just wanna sing a song with you…_

**Please review!!! Thanks for reading.**


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